The data that we have don’t suggest anything approaching a “catastrophic” shortage. Data obtained by Barnum from five states and 19 large U.S. school districts, including in New York City and Houston, show that teacher-turnover rates haven’t actually increased despite more teachers threatening to quit. As for those polls of teachers who say they plan to quit en masse? Researchers told me that for every three teachers telling pollsters that they plan to quit in the next year, only one actually leaves their job. Teacher burnout might become a mental-health crisis in the near future, but to conflate it with an acute teacher shortage right now is neither accurate nor helpful.
“I think we’ve actually gained classroom teachers in the last year, because of new hiring after the federal stimulus bills,” said Aldeman, the education-finance writer. Federal pandemic funds have given schools tens of billions of dollars to hire additional staff, including classroom instructors, teaching assistants, and bus drivers. For example, New Mexico has directed $37 million of its federal relief money to hire 500 educational assistants, as Education Week reported. When those positions go unfilled, they’re counted as additional vacancies. “There might be a shortage in the sense that a lot of new positions are going unfilled,” Schwartz told me. But is it useful to use the term shortage when, compared with staff numbers before the pandemic, more teachers might be employed in America’s public schools right now than in 2019?
In fact, the clearest nationwide story isn’t a sharp drop in the number of public-school teachers. It’s a sharp drop in public-school student enrollment.
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